Sir Roger Moore looks back at being on set in For Your Eyes Only. Dutch
courage was the only way to get him up a mountain for the scene where Bond
falls 60 feet from the top

It is unusual to see a picture of the producer Cubby Broccoli and me on set without a backgammon board in front of us. We used to play during all the breaks from shooting and the directors always had a terrible job getting me back into the set when we were in the middle of a game; if Cubby was winning he absolutely would not let me go. We played for money and kept a book to mark down the hundreds of thousands we ran up. On the last day of shooting we’d settle up and by then things had usually evened out, so it might end being only two or three thousand dollars that one of us had to pay. And we always paid – I would have killed Cubby if he hadn’t.

Cubby’s stepson, the executive producer and Bond screenwriter Michael G Wilson, is sitting on my left. He is in costume for his bit-part as a Greek Orthodox priest. He often used to have a little Hitchcock-like walk across in Bond films. It looks as if this was taken just before he was called to the set. They must have been filming an establishing shot that I wasn’t in because I certainly wasn’t playing Bond wearing that T-shirt and shorts.

In a way this is a very sad photograph for me. It brings to mind the scene in For Your Eyes Only where Bond meets another bearded priest, who was in fact Q, played by Desmond Llewelyn, in disguise. Originally Bernie Lee’s character M was going to play that priest, but poor Bernie, who had played M for the first 11 Bond films, was ill with cancer and had a lot of problems so couldn’t do it – he died while we were still filming and M was written out of the film.

For Your Eyes Only was shot in Greece over about four months. We started off in Corfu before moving to the mainland to locations including Kalabaka, in the Thessaly region, where there are monasteries situated on pinnacles. I remember having to do the mountaineering shots wearing those terrible shoes and being absolutely petrified of heights.

I was doubled by the marvellous Rick Sylvester for the scene in For Your Eyes Only where Bond is knocked off his perch trying to climb up to the monastery – he falls about 60 feet before coming to a sudden stop on the end of the rope, which brings tears to your eyes. Rick also did that brilliant ski jump in the Arctic Circle at the beginning of The Spy Who Loved Me [1977], my third Bond. I had to drop a few feet down the mountain in Greece to get the close-ups of the fall, and that is not something I ever want to retry. I still had to get up the sides of those blasted cliffs. The night before I did that scene I got hold of some Valium tablets and a bottle of beer. Dutch courage was the only way I was going to get up there.